Aggregation convergecast scheduling in wireless sensor networks

We consider the problem of scheduling in wireless sensor networks for the purposes of aggregation convergecast. We observe that existing schemes adopt essentially a two phase approach, consisting of, first, a tree construction and, second, a scheduling phase. Following a similar approach, we propose two new improvements, one to each of the two phases. Starting with a new lower bound on the schedule length, we make use of it in the tree construction phase. The tree construction phase consists of solutions to instances of bipartite graph semi-matchings. The scheduling phase is a weight-based priority scheme that obeys dependency (tree) and interference constraints. Our extensive experiments show that, overall, our proposed solution not only outperforms all previously proposed solutions in terms of schedule length, but it also significantly extends the network's lifetime.